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Mission Local Presents:
The immigration crackdown and resistance in San Francisco

ENGLISH | ESPAÑOL

Join us for a night of community and learning about the immigration crack down in San Francisco and what you can do to get involved.

Mission Local Presents:
The immigration crackdown and resistance in San Francisco

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

6:00pm – 8:30pm

All Ages

Seated discussion

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.

About the Event

Mission Local is hosting a panel discussion about the immigration crackdown in San Francisco and what our community has been doing to resist. Following the panel there will be a chance to learn about volunteer opportunities and to connect with others in the audience.

Detailed Schedule:

• 6:00 – 6:30PM Explore resources and learn how San Franciscans are protecting our communities

• 6:30 – 8:00PM Panel

• 8:00 – 8:30PM Community conversation and resource fair

Panelists:

Angela Chan

Angela Chan is an Assistant Chief Attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender's Office. She oversees the Confront + Advocate team, which confronts state violence and advances community-led solutions. She leads efforts with community partners to pass local and state policies that dismantle the carceral system and expand support for system-impacted people. Her team also uncovers law-enforcement misconduct and drives strategic communications to challenge state-sponsored harm.

Before joining the Public Defender’s Office, Angela spent over 15 years at Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, where she was the Policy Director and also launched the nation’s first Criminal Justice Reform Program at an Asian and Pacific Islander civil rights organization. She co-founded FREESF and the statewide ICE out of CA coalition, helping pass landmark Sanctuary laws—including the TRUST Act, TRUTH Act, CA Values Act, and local Sanctuary Ordinance protections—as well as the Pardon and Commutation Reform Act of 2018.

Angela previously served on the San Francisco Police Commission. She holds a B.A. from Occidental College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Antonella

Antonella is a social worker and mother from Peru. She moved to the Bay Area two years ago after developing a career in social work for children. Due to escalating violence and threats targeted towards her work, Antonella made the difficult decision to seek asylum in the United States. Today, she is a committed advocate for immigrant rights and, drawing from her own experience of unlawful detention, speaks out on behalf of those navigating the immigration system.

Marissa Hatton

Marissa is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Racial Justice Team at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco. She is one of the lead attorneys on Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, a lawsuit challenging ICE’s practices of ambushing and arresting people at immigration courts and holding them for extended periods in inhumane conditions. The Pablo Sequen legal team recently won a preliminary injunction requiring ICE to improve the conditions at the holding facility at 630 Sansome in downtown San Francisco.

Prior to LCCRSF, Marissa worked on disability rights in state prisons and taught in the Civil Rights Clinic at Georgetown Law, where she oversaw litigation in state and federal courts on a variety of issues including police misconduct, state-sanctioned surveillance of racial justice organizers, and inhumane medical treatment by private prison contractors. Marissa has litigated and tried impact cases in over a dozen federal and appellate jurisdictions, with a focus on racial justice and the carceral state.

Milli Atkinson

Milli Atkinson is the director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program run by the Justice and Diversity Center at the Bar Association of San Francisco. In this role, she works to uphold access to justice for low-income and unrepresented immigrants and operates the Attorney of the Day program— a program which provides free legal representation to immigrants in the Bay Area. In response to the immigration crackdown by the Trump Administration, Atkinson has been leading the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative (SFILDC) since 2017. Through their rapid response work, she has coordinated intakes and referrals, conducted legal training, and filed habeas petitions on behalf of individuals detained during courthouse arrests.

Atkinson began as an attorney for Centro de Ayuda Legal para Inmigrantes and later became a supervising attorney for the Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) in San Francisco. There, she provided pro bono representation to recently arrived children and their families before the San Francisco Immigration Court.

Shira Levine

Shira Levine is the incoming Deputy Legal Director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area (IIBA). She served as an immigration judge in San Francisco from 2021 to 2025, until she was fired as part of the recent nationwide terminations of immigration judges. Before joining the bench, Shira worked as an attorney at two Bay Area nonprofits—Centro Legal de la Raza and IIBA—where she represented asylum seekers and other noncitizens in removal proceedings. Since leaving the bench, she has been working with advocates and organizations to build the Bay Area Habeas Network to address ICE arrests. She has also begun a historical research project examining the persistent instability of asylum law and its effects on immigration courts. Shira studied history at the University of Michigan, earned her J.D. from Stanford Law School, and clerked for Judge Harry Pregerson on the Ninth Circuit.

Partners

Mission Local

Mission Local is an independent, non-profit news site that produces high-impact journalism that digs deep, adds value, and engages San Francisco readers. Core to our mission is being free and accessible to all readers. We also train the next generation of journalists, who reflect the diversity of San Francisco.

Chinese for Affirmative Action

Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) was founded in 1969 to protect the civil and political rights of Chinese Americans and to advance multiracial democracy in the United States. Today, CAA is a progressive voice in and on behalf of the broader Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We advocate for systemic change that protects immigrant rights, promotes language diversity, and remedies racial and social injustice.

Hand in Hand

Hand in Hand is building a just and caring economy starting in our homes and communities. We support employers of nannies, housecleaners, home care workers and attendants, their families, and allies to make their homes safe and equitable workplaces. We organize people to demand dignity and fairness for domestic workers and to win public investment in care for families, people with disabilities, and older adults.

Homey

The mission of HOMEY is to transform the lives of high-risk youth and inspire them to not only choose a path of education, self-sufficiency and non-violence, but also strive towards physical, mental and emotional health. We do this through the youth development practices of cultural and artistic expression, skill building, relationship building, youth participation in decision-making, and community involvement.

Mission Action

Mission Action is a San Francisco–based nonprofit that nurtures individual wellness and builds collective power among low-income and immigrant communities. For over 40 years, we have provided vital services including housing and shelter, deportation defense and legal advocacy, worker rights programs, and community organizing. Rooted in dignity, solidarity, and equity, Mission Action works to ensure that every person—regardless of income or immigration status—has the opportunity to live with safety, stability, and hope.

American Community Media

American Community Media delivers reporting that reflects America’s diverse communities from the inside out, while fostering grassroots engagement, multilingual messaging, and advocacy that amplifies authentic voices—connecting advertisers with trusted community media partners nationwide.

La Raza Centro Legal

La Raza Centro Legal's mission is to provide high quality, free legal representation to the Latino community and other low-income immigrant families. We work to advance civil and human rights and ensure access to justice especially for peoples most impacted by historical discrimination and violence. We aspire to be the most trusted legal services provider in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area is the leading civil rights organization on the West Coast that works on groundbreaking impact litigation and provides direct services to low-income, immigrant, and historically vulnerable communities.

Parivar

Parivar Bay Area is the USA's first & only Kinnar Hijrah led and empowering organization centering Indian South Asian and Global South transgender, gender-diverse, and intersex (TGNCI) immigrants and asylees, particularly those culturally rooted gender-expansive identities since 2018. Based in San Francisco with global mindset, we are rooted in Indian heritage, Trans leadership, and immigrant justice, we advance social, economic, and legal equity through advocacy, arts, direct support, and leadership development. We reclaim spaces beyond cisnormativity, confront systemic barriers, and build bold, affirming pathways where our communities thrive locally and globally grounded in dignity, belonging, and pride

Respond Crisis Translation

Respond Crisis Translation is a grassroots language justice organization of 3,000 interpreters and translators. We mobilize through direct service (rapid response emergency language access support in 200+ languages), Mutual aid (holistic community-centered care for crisis-impacted language workers, workforce development, dignified wages, housing, financial, and mental health support), and Community organizing (interventions to stop deportations, arrests, and other abuses fueled by language rights violations).

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